Rockland partnership grows at the speed of cyberspace technology

South Shore entrepreneurs catapult Elevate Technology Services into one of the nation's fastest growing IT services companies.

Siobhan O’GradyPatriot Ledger Correspondent

QUINCY – Technology is all about benefits and threats. And the speed and sophistication of development on both sides of that spectrum has spawned industries of their own. In an age when almost all information, from baby pictures to strategic war plans is transmitted through digital channels, the risk of having that information accessed by hackers, phishers, cyber criminals and terrorists has never been greater.
From personal credit data breaches, like the most recent Target Corporation and Neiman Marcus hijacks, to allegations of international governmental and industrial cyber hacking, retailers, financial institutions, corporations and government agencies have become vulnerable.

The expanding need for specialized information technology services in the private and public sectors led four Massachusetts businessmen to go all in to meet what they saw as a universal product need.

In 2009, brothers Michael McCabe of Sandwich and Matthew McCabe of Canton, partnered with former Hingham resident Mark Miller and Mike Paynotta of Duxbury to found Elevate Technology Solutions.

The four left their corporate positions in other industries to build a staffing and consulting services company based in Rockland. Since then, the company has experienced massive growth in clients, increased revenues, and has expanded enough to open facilities in two other out-of-state locations

Elevate recruits IT specialists with a specific focus on enterprise applications, cloud technology, big data and cyber security. Their clients range from small private companies to the U.S. government. And the flexible strategy of using contract experts to supplement staff knowledge gives them a competitive edge on finding the right solution for their client needs, they say.

The four took a risk when they opened up shop in the midst of the recession. But as managing partner Michael McCabe sees it, it was also a time when companies were trying to learn how to be better at using the Internet to their advantage – and in need of the kinds of services Elevate and its contractors could supply.

“We took a gamble by starting a company at that time,” McCabe said. “But we’ve had explosive growth because we embraced the technology change and used that to propel what our vision was in the marketplace because we knew people needed to leverage companies like us in order to grow.”

And the numbers prove the wisdom of that vision. In its first year in business, Elevate had two clients. Since then, it has served 55 commercial clients and nine government agencies, and placed 722 consultants on assignments.

Revenue, which was $456,679 in 2009, grew to a $17 million by the end of 2013, they say. The company also expanded from its corporate headquarters in Rockland to open new offices in Reston, VA, and Raleigh, NC.

Elevate’s tremendous growth landed it the 92nd spot on INC 500’s list of fastest-growing IT services companies in the country – the single fastest-growing one in Massachusetts.

According to Elevate’s leadership team, the growth in threats is directly related to a growth in technology. And the growth in Elevate’s business follows that tech/threat curve.

“In the past, the way you took data about people was to walk out of a building with data or a hard drive,” said Beth Purdue, the company’s vice president of corporate development and strategy. “Today, there are so many different ways to threaten security.”

And though its original mission was to provide its clients with opportunities to benefit from virtual mobility and cloud technology, it has adapted to the needs of those clients whose concerns have transitioned to cyber security.

Elevate competes with other staffing agencies that provide similar services, but has found a large client base in Massachusetts and Washington, D.C., which led to word of mouth introductions nation-wide, they say.

“Our specialists have to think about how someone walks off with the information now,” Purdue says. “Is it through a human person, is it through a device, a series of devices, spider technology … these people have to use their imaginations to figure out how people might do it and how they might do it in volume.”

“Originally, cyber security was secondary, but we’ve evolved into that,” McCabe said. “Your customers take you places sometimes. At we were more focused in some technologies like virtualization, but now it is obvious that security wraps around all these.”